Curiosity got the better of him, and Zach typed in Nora Sutherlin and hit Enter. He found several fan pages, some links to fan fiction and Nora’s official website. Zach kept scrolling through all the mentions of Nora on the web. He clicked the link to someone’s blog that carried an entry entitled “Last Night with THE Nora Sutherlin.” But as soon as Zach clicked the link the page disappeared. He hit Back and tried to find it again, but the page had vanished. Maybe the blog server was down.

Zach gave up nosing on Nora and looked up more S&M terminology. As uncomfortable as the idea of coupling pain with sex, he did appreciate that people in the community seemed fairly responsible in their play. Every webpage he landed on carried the mantra “safe, sane and consensual.” He stared for a long time at an image of a young woman wearing a brown leather collar that buckled and locked at the base of her neck. Zach remembered Nora had said she’d been “collared” to Søren. Collars were apparently quite an important part of the S&M scene. Nora had touched his naked wedding ring finger that night in the cab and then brought his hand to her bare neck. She’d equated being collared with marriage. Maybe that’s why he and Nora had found common ground so quickly despite being such wildly different people—they were both going through a divorce of sorts.

But was he going through a divorce? Every day when he checked his mail, he expected papers from Grace’s attorney. Every time his home phone rang, he expected it to be Grace telling him they needed to stop putting it off. But so far he’d received no calls or legal papers. Was she waiting on him to start the process? If so, she might have to wait a long time. He couldn’t deny their marriage had fallen apart in the past year and a half, but he was in no hurry to put the final nail in the coffin. He’d hoped if he came to New York, she’d miss him enough to want to make it work again. But every day the phone stayed mute.

Zach closed the internet and exited from his empty document without writing a single sentence. He’d left Nora in her kitchen hours ago. Surely she’d sent him another email by now—she emailed him constantly. But his in-box sat empty but for a reminder from J.P. about the next staff meeting and a question from his assistant, Mary. Both could wait.

He clicked on New and typed in Nora’s email address. Of course she would have an address with “littleredridingcrop” in it. Ludicrous as it was, at least it made it easy to remember.

Nora, he wrote and stopped. Why was he writing her? They’d discussed her book for hours today. There was no more to talk about for now. And considering they already had a reputation for working too closely together, he knew he didn’t need to be writing her about anything but the book. What would he say if he did write her? He had those words, those sentences. But they had tumbled about in his head so much since meeting her that they had crashed against each other, against him, and broken into fragments.